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Why Office Jerks Get Ahead
People who score high on some sinister personality traits appear to have better career prospects, according to a scientific review.
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Risky Business: Teens Brains Behind the Wheel
Teen drivers are notorious for their bad decisions behind the wheel. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, the risk of car crashes is higher among 16-19-year-olds than among any other age group. In fact, per mile driven, teen drivers are nearly three times more likely than drivers aged 20 and older to be in a fatal crash. You might think that a more developmentally mature brain would guarantee more sensible decision-making in teen drivers, but a new study suggests just the opposite.
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Examining the Mechanics of Different Types of Choice
Have you ever noticed your attention gravitating toward the first or last item on a menu, or toward the centrally placed items on a grocery store shelf? Why does placement influence our choices and decisions? In a recent Perspectives on Psychological Science article, APS Fellow Maya Bar-Hillel (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) tells the tale of how she came to better understand how position influences our choices and shares what she has learned about the circumstances under which people chose certain items. In the early 2000s, Bar-Hillel supervised a doctoral student who was examining how test takers answer multiple-choice questions.
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Maximizing the Gains and Minimizing the Pains of Diversity
For organizations, diversity pays off. Empirical research has shown that diversity increases creativity and innovation and promotes better decision making because it spurs deeper information processing and complex thinking.
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Men’s Interest in Babies Linked With Hormonal Responses to Sexual Stimuli
Young men’s interest in babies is associated with their physiological reactivity to sexually explicit material, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study showed that young men who reported more interest in babies showed a lower increase in testosterone in response to sexually explicit material than men who weren’t as interested in babies. “Our findings show there is a strong mind-body connection: Liking or not liking babies is related to how a man’s body – specifically, his testosterone – responds to sexual stimuli,” explains Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago, lead researcher on the study.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: The Price of Perspective Taking: Child Depressive Symptoms Interact With Parental Empathy to Predict Immune Functioning in Parents Erika M. Manczak, Devika Basu, and Edith Chen People vary in the amount of empathy -- the tendency to affectively experience and adopt the perspective of others -- they experience. Empathy is generally considered to be a positive and desirable trait, but are there circumstances in which empathy is harmful?
